Writing a single-text answer
Open with the reading, not with the furniture
- The first sentence states your claim — the one-sentence reading from your plan, already arguable and already evidenced. Not the writer uses several techniques to create an effect on the reader, which is true of every text ever written.
Group by effect, not by technique
- A paragraph headed by a technique lists. A paragraph headed by an effect argues. The writer uses repetition… announces a device and hunts for things it does. The writer conveys the narrator's effort through sentence length alone… announces a claim, and the devices arrive as evidence.
- This also produces integration, because a paragraph about one effect can draw on a word choice, a sentence shape and a placement at once.
- Two paragraphs, two aspects, two effects is the shape of a complete answer to Questions One and Two, with each aspect named in the paragraph's first sentence so the count is visible.
- Check it worked: if the paragraph could be retitled with a device name without loss, it has slipped back into listing.
The five-part paragraph
- Point (the claim, naming the aspect) — Evidence (a short quotation, usually a phrase or single word) — Analysis (how the feature produces the effect) — Judgement (the Level 3 sentence: does it work, what does it cost, how significant, how does it compare) — Link (what this leaves the next paragraph to do).
- The judgement is the part that gets dropped when time is short. Drop the link instead. A paragraph without a link is slightly abrupt; a paragraph without a judgement is a Level 2 paragraph.
Quote short, and quote exactly
- A phrase, often a single word, which puts claim and proof in the same glance. Copy exactly — the text is in front of the marker, so a misquotation discredits every claim about diction in the answer.
- Match the evidence to the scale of the claim. A claim about a word needs the word; a claim about a pattern needs at least two instances.
- Some evidence is not quotable, and it still counts: placement; absence, evidenced by naming the places the thing could have been said and was not; frequency — four of the seven sentences; and where the text begins and ends. A count is the closest a structural claim gets to a quotation.
- Do not quote to prove a feature exists — position the quotation to support the effect claim.
Judge in every paragraph
- Every paragraph ends in a sentence a well-read person could disagree with, and judgement is never saved for a conclusion — a conclusion that finally evaluates admits the body described.
- Vary the kind of judgement, and rank your aspects against each other: of the two, the structural choice governs more is free, because you have already analysed both.
Depth, proportion and sophistication
- Three features analysed to judgement beats seven named, and proportion is visible — the biggest claim should get the most space. Concede in the strongest form: a counter-case stated weakly reads as evasion.
- Declare where your reading stops, then investigate the exception. The place a claim fails is usually the best paragraph available.
- Insight lives in relations, not items — the feature that governs rather than displays, the break in a pattern, the detail that looks trivial, the near-repetition, the first line against the last. Relations are invisible until two things are held together, which is why a hurried reading never finds them.
Worked Example
Worked Example
The passage below was written for this topic, so it can be quoted in full. Treat it as a text supplied in the exam.
The question asks: Discuss how the writer conveys the narrator's situation, referring to at least TWO specific aspects of written texts.
Answer (Merit — reading stated, aspects named, judgement sustained):
The passage's governing choice is grammatical rather than figurative: the narrator reports actions and withholds feeling, and the writer uses that restraint to convey a situation the narrator cannot state directly.
The first aspect is syntax. Everywhere else the sentences are short — "I said the drive was fine." Then the longest and most subordinated sentence in the passage arrives: "because the second time she asked it was a new question and I was not going to be the one who told her otherwise." The accumulation is the sound of someone explaining a decision they have not admitted making, so the writer conveys the narrator's effort through sentence length alone — the passage's most effective single choice, because the reader hears the strain without the narrator claiming any.
The second aspect is structural: what the passage withholds. The mother's condition is never named, nor the reason for the visit — consistently enough to be a rule, with at least four points where a writer would ordinarily supply it and none does. Of the two aspects this one governs more, because the syntax could vary without changing what the passage is; the refusal could not.
The Excellence move: the detail that looks trivial. "For about ninety seconds" is the only measurement in the passage, and it is evidence that the narrator was counting — which is not what someone does during a pleasant moment.
Two aspects, two effects, a judgement at the end of each.